Wednesday, April 12, 2017

L-A Radio: Wendy Walsh Speaks-Up "For My Daughters"

As Wendy Walsh pursued a career as a TV news correspondent and anchor in Los Angeles during the late 1980s and ‘90s, sexist remarks and bad behavior from supervisors were common, reports The LA Times.

She had bosses attempt to “stick their tongues down my throat,” as she describes it. One of them once told her not to get up from a makeup chair until she looked “datable” to him, she said.

“I’ve had it all,” Walsh, 54, told The Times in a recent telephone interview. “I’m a woman of a certain age who has been in the TV industry for a long time.”

Walsh, now a psychologist with an advice show on radio station KFI 640 AM, has stepped into the spotlight with a sexual harassment accusation involving a job she didn’t get. She contends Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly went back on a stated commitment to get her a position as a paid contributor at Fox News after she rejected his advances at a 2013 dinner meeting at Hotel Bel-Air.

Walsh was reluctant to speak out at first. She surveyed many friends and acquaintances to determine whether to relay her experience that she says led O’Reilly to renege on a commitment to give her a job.

“I started to notice this theme. Young women seemed to be strong, feminist and idealistic while the older women that I surveyed shrugged their shoulders and said, ‘Oh I’ve had worse happen to me,’” Walsh said. “That’s when I saw this generational divide that really bothered me. I thought, ‘You know what? These young women feminists are leading us and they’re our daughters. We should be leading them.’ So I really did it for my daughters.”

Walsh is the single mother of two daughters, 18 and 13, both of whom support her decision to go public.